August 31, 2010

Why is it we think that we can build a server and a desktop and a mobile platform and a computational cluster platform and EVERYTHING out of a single tree of pkgs and a single kernel? Is it not possible that easy, functional and versatile is too many things to ask for and keep everyone getting along?

I’m going to suggest something radical:

fedora server should be a complete tree branch – with its own criteria for admittance of pkgs and updates

fedora should continue as is with the focus being the desktop and targetted the user that the board defined a little while back:

We found four defining characteristics that we
believe best describe the Fedora distribution's target audience:
Someone who (1) is voluntarily switching to Linux, (2) is familiar
with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer, (3) is
likely to collaborate in some fashion when something's wrong with
Fedora, and (4) wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either
using desktop applications or a Web browser.

Perfect, right? We can focus on the issues of a server and of cutting the edge of what servers need while the desktop-oriented folks make a great desktop (or desktops) and we don’t have to have these pitched battles over systemd and networkmanager and policykit and what not.

August 26, 2010

August 19, 2010

In the last round of roll outs the fedora packagedb added tags and ratings to the site. A great bit of work by mbacovsk, maploin and toshio made this happen. I added support for yum to use the db that the pkgdb can spit out, searching on the tags for pkgs, provided that the info is in the repodata. It’s not quite percolated to the top of anyone’s list to get it into the repodata in bodhi. However with the advent of repos.fp.o I now have a good place to store this and make it accessible to users.

So make sure you have yum updated on your system – at least yum 3.2.26.

August 19, 2010

Yesterday someone was talking about installing apps in fedora and how it was hard to figure out what to install/try b/c there were too much STUFF in fedora. They suggested an ‘app store’ like functionality. I explained that all the resources to do something like that exist in the infrastructure yum and friends offer now. I decided to prove that concept a bit.

The concept of an ‘app’ is pretty amorphous but I decided to just use what Colin Walters said was his definition of an ‘app’ – which is any pkg containing a .desktop file. So I just whipped up a simple tool to dump out an xml-file of a format yum is already familiar with based on that criteria:

On Sat, 2002-08-10 at 15:23, Eunice Chang wrote:
> okay, happy news! it works for me!
>
> one thing, though. i use gnome x windows, and i was wondering how one can
> change the display– i had the gnome ximian setup tools, but they don’t work
> in 7.3.
>
> now that i have 7.3 up and running, what else do i need to do?

Change the display to do what? If you mean the resolution then you’ll
want to go to a text-console (ctrl-alt-f1) then login as root and run
Xconfigurator.

-sv

Eight years later I’m not doing as much tech support for her but we do support each other.